The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (32 page)

“The peaches are like rocks, aren't they? It always happens.”

She said, “Are you an ice cream salesman?”

“Nope, just an interested party.”

Now I stood back so that I could kick in the door. “Seriously,” I said, “do you remember that? Are you there?” When she didn't answer, I kicked as hard as I could, right under the knob, and felt the jamb crack—not all the way, but enough. I got ready to kick again, and she screamed at me to stop. Please, just stop.

So I stopped. I put my mouth right up to the door so she'd be sure to hear me.

“You know what I was doing that day? I was on my way to a delivery, and I had my windows rolled down. I rolled through downtown, and I heard the music and saw all those people there and the old buildings around them and the trees. And I said to myself, ‘What would it feel like to be like them?' So I stopped and got out. And I met you.”

I waited for her to say something.

“I've made a lot of mistakes,” I said, “but that wasn't one of them. I can be a good person if you'll let me. Now, are you going to let me in so we can talk?”

“I'm holding a knife. Go ahead. Kick the door in the rest of the way.”

It was a relief, in a way. It's good to know where things stand.

“Fine,” I said. “But I should probably tell you where your mom is right now.”

Marissa drove her own car and followed me. At the tank yard, I told her to wait at the gate. “Not until you tell me what's going on,” she said, but she'd followed me this far. She wasn't going anywhere. I held a finger to my lips and crept up to the office, listened at the door, and then opened it. Her mom was still tied up as I'd left her except that she'd tipped the chair over and was lying on her side. She had a bruise on the side of her forehead that you could see as soon as I set her upright again. I went back out and called Marissa over. When she saw her mom, she ripped off the blindfold and the gag.

“Apparently she owed some other dealers money. They weren't as nice as me.”

Marissa stood with her back to the wall, next to the door, as far from her mom as she could get. “How did
you
know that?”

I sighed. “Because I'm a caring person who looks out for his customers.” She opened her mouth to tell me what she thought of that, and I said, “Because I know things. That's why. After I heard, I went by her house to check on her, and I found this.” I held up the sandwich bag. “This had meth in it, now it doesn't. And I didn't leave it there. Now, you want to get her out of here or what?”

Together we carried her to Marissa's car and slid her into the back seat. I followed her back into town, to the hospital, though I didn't go in. I had thirty-three thousand dollars in a jar under my porch, and that was what I could do, I realized. I could pay for her mom to get clean. So I went home, got down on my hands and knees, and reached under the porch. I reached as far as I could but felt only dirt. I went and got a flashlight. Only dirt. The jar was gone.

I waited until after dark, way after, closer to sunrise than sunset. I wanted to make sure Rob was done cooking, that he was asleep, that he was alone. First I went back to the tank yard, filled up a propane tank with anhydrous, and put it on the floor on the passenger side of my truck, close enough that I could hold on to it around curves so it wouldn't roll around. When it was almost morning, I went over to Rob's. I carried the tank to the back of the house, where his bedroom was. With my finger, I poked a hole in the tinfoil covering his window. There was some old tubing in his backyard, stuff we'd thrown out because of wear and tear, but it was good enough for this. I slid the tubing through the hole until I felt it hit the floor. I connected the other end to the tank and turned the valve. The smell of the ammonia was unbearable, even from twenty feet away, where I stood listening for him to wake up, which he did. He thrashed and threw himself against the wall. He screamed. But he couldn't see, and so he never did find his way out of the room.

When it was over, I went to the back porch to start looking for my money. It wasn't much of a porch, not much bigger than a bathroom floor. He'd moved the new chair onto the middle of it, and I stood there looking at that chair. Somebody had spent a lot of time on that chair. The owner probably had a flower garden with a trellis and a climbing rose, and maybe there were kid toys in the yard and a basketball hoop and one of those lawn-art roadrunners with legs that spin in the wind. You work hard, pay your property taxes, paint your siding when it peels or invest in vinyl, and somebody runs off with whatever isn't chained and bolted to a concrete slab. I climbed on top and stuck my hand up through the soffit hole where there should have been a screen but now was open. I reached around until I found my jar and the Maxwell coffee can. I took both back to my truck, and then I came back for the chair. He didn't deserve something so nice, and neither did I, but I intended to one day, so I took it.

The woman who could have been the love of my life got her mom straight again. She went to college. After three years, she graduated and got a job at a bank in Overland Park, a nice suburb of Kansas City where no one is poor and everyone looks cut out of a magazine advertisement for IAMS dog food. She met a man, married him, had three kids, and sometimes her mom comes to stay with them. Her mom, so far as I know, doesn't use drugs anymore. I'd like to take credit for the change, but it turns out that lots of people give up drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, candy, dairy, gluten, poor choices, dead-end jobs, bad partners, the places they live, their pasts, their futures. There's no end to what willpower can achieve. You just have to want things, I guess. Every year, around Christmas, I send her a card. I just write my name. The message is whatever the Hallmark people dreamed up.

A lot of people are able to become exactly the kind of person they want to become, good and upstanding, pillars of the community, a benefit to all who know them. There are gifts in life to those who deserve them. And some people are there to take it away. I like to think that they get exactly what they have coming.

TODD ROBINSON

FROM
Last Word

T
WENTY-FIVE TONS OF
garbage truck made a sharp left onto Mott Street. Will stood on the back runner, his fingers laced through the railing. The summertime stink of Chinatown started polluting his sinuses from three streets away. Those blocks were the worst of the run; the smell of rotting seafood was one that wouldn't leave his nose for a few hours. It roosted inside his nasal cavity like an Alphabet City squatter.

It was worse than Will could have imagined. Even worse than the detailed descriptions his old man had given him about the bad old days.

The elder Mr. Pokorski had warned Will long before he'd set his son up with the job for the summer. The trash route Will was on was the same that his father had done up until his retirement three years ago. It was a soft scam going back generations. A lot of union guys, especially the ones who worked the roughest summer runs, would pay the sons of other union members ten bucks an hour and pocket the rest of their salary for the additional days off. Some guys, like the one Will was covering, were willing to sacrifice the money for the entire summer so long as it meant they wouldn't have to deal with Chinatown at all for the season.

Will absolutely understood the reasons now.

Even though the sun had set a full five hours ago, the heat that had been absorbed deeply into the concrete radiated up in waves, cooking the filth like a convection oven. What sat at the bottom of the black garbage bags had been slow-cooking from the ground up.

Like he tended to do, Antoine made the left hard and fast, disregarding the fact that the light had turned full red a good three seconds before he accelerated into the turn. Two cars let loose with a horn blare as they screeched to short stops.

Will was trying to keep the fetid air at bay by keeping his nose and mouth covered with the crook of his elbow as they sped down the street. When Antoine made another attempted Tokyo Drift move with the garbage truck, the centrifugal force nearly tore Will off the back. “Slow down, you freakin' lunatic!”

Antoine haw-hawed his ass off in the driver's seat. Will could see his fat frame bouncing up and down in laughter through the big side mirror. Just the day before, a hard turn onto Canal nearly turned a middle-aged woman's labradoodle into slurry under the truck's thick wheels.

When he started the job at the beginning of June, Will asked Antoine what was up with the New York City garbage trucks' disregard for traffic laws and public safety in general.

“Fuck 'em,” was all Antoine answered with.

Back in the day, Antoine was one of the summertime kids, just like Will. Antoine had done the route with his old man, now a lifer with the Sanitation Department.

Will had no intention of being a lifer. Even though he was sorely jealous of his friends who'd all thrown in for a rental down the shore for the summer, Will wanted the money. When he started the criminal law program at Long Island University in the fall, he had no intention of doing so while commuting out of his parents' home. Will was getting his own place with his girlfriend, Cara. His buddies would still be living in their tiny childhood bedrooms with their Eli Manning posters and high school track trophies. Will was going to finally have his own space to bang his girlfriend without the threat of either his mother coming in or, worse, Cara's dad, the NYPD sergeant.

It was this promise of carnal freedom that kept Will hanging on to his sanity, kept him from seething at the thought of missing what was probably the last hurrah for high school on the shore.

It'll be worth it. It's all going to be worth it,
he told himself over and over, every night.

The truck pulled up in front of Lucky Star Restaurant, and Will hopped off. He moved double-time while in Chinatown, wanting to get the hell gone before his gag reflex kicked in. He hurled the trash bags as quickly as he could into the rear of the truck.

One night after grousing about the run at the one bar in Staten Island with a bouncer dumb enough to accept his shitty Times Square fake ID, another customer had asked him how bad could the smell be? He was a garbage man, after all.

“How bad can it be?” Will replied. “I'm a goddamn garbage man, and the smell makes me want to puke. Every goddamn time. That's how bad the smell is.”

He'd tried to use a facemask for a while, but after a couple of breaths it only felt like the stink was trapped underneath the thin sheet of cotton, pressed even closer to his face.

There was nothing he could do about it other than hope for short summer months or for something inside his olfactory system to finally give up and die.

Will grabbed the last bag off the pile, the plastic drooping sadly next to a mostly disassembled chest of drawers. On the upswing toward the compactor well, the bag caught on an exposed screw and burst open like a ripe cyst, viscous liquid splattering along the front of his jumpsuit.

“
Fuck,
” Will yelped as the warm fluid soaked through his clothing and boots. He stepped back and felt it squishing wet inside his socks. He was about to reflexively put his hand over his mouth in order to suppress the gagging that he felt rising inside him when he realized that his gloves were covered in what looked like rotting calamari in gelatin.

By the time all his senses could coordinate which aspect to be horrified at (the answer being all of it), Will's vision swam.

On top of everything else, Will had to worry about fainting out of sheer disgust. Took him a moment—a terrible, terrible moment—but then he noticed that his vision wasn't in fact swimming. What were swimming, however, were the hundreds of maggots embedded in the fluid that was covering him.

He nearly screamed.

He almost did.

But it's really hard to scream when you're projectile-vomiting all over the side of a garbage truck on Mott Street.

All the way down Mott Street . . .

All the way to Oliver Street . . .

Back up Katherine Street to Henry Street . . .

Antoine haw-hawed so hard at Will that he nearly threw up himself. On the corner of Market, Antoine had to jump out of the truck's cab, heaving and hawing so loudly that a middle-aged Chinese lady started yelling at him out her window.

Will didn't understand the Mandarin that the woman was shrieking, but it was pretty easily translated into the old classic of NYC sentiments:
Shut the fuck up.

Will found himself lagging on the bag tosses. All of his prior instincts and muscle memory from the job abandoned him as he was filled with a new caution that he'd never had on the job before. Only a couple more blocks after Antoine nearly lost his dinner, he was whining at Will to speed it up. They were already a half hour behind from their usual mark, and at their current pace they were only going to fall further behind.

But despite all sense of self-preservation toward his senses, Will didn't want to have another bag pop open on him. As it was, he was already dreading his girlfriend's reaction when he got home. She already gave him shit for coming into the apartment smelling the way he did after a normal night on the job, with no exploding bags of Chinatown muck in the mix.

And for some reason he kept thinking about the Hispanic lady at the cleaners, who always looked at him like he was the worst person on earth when he walked through the door of her laundromat. If she held him in distaste before, she was going to love the bag he was going to drop off that night.

He didn't know why he feared the woman's ire, but he did.

That said, he carefully eyeballed every bag for telltale rips, lighter areas of plastic where the bag might be stretched to a point of near-breakage. Nor was he cavalierly chucking the bags into the back, either. Each bag he lifted carefully, if not daintily, as far away from his body as he could, then lobbed it in the back with no more velocity that one would underhand a wiffle ball to a toddler.